The far sound.

[Music] n [Music] a [Music] I believe in the future wires will unite different cities and a man in one part of the country May communicate with another by word of mouth in a distant Place hello Central Central will you connect me to do you hear me Jimmy is that you hey H up oh my darling last night was so two men to men the she said that well I gave her a piece of my mind and then you know this old switchboard could talk wow your ears would Sizzle young man you brought my daughter home after dark and I don't believe that poppycock about the horse going late 1880 we take Alexander Gran Bell's invention for granted today perhaps we should but isn't it incredible that millions and millions of people can talk simultaneously to practically any spot on Earth in the beginning back in the old days the telephone was something of an oddity to say the least you'd pick up this receiver to see that the line was clear then you'd hang up and ring with this crank and you'd pick it up again and tell the operator what number you wanted Central 6A please thank you she'd hook it up for you on her switchboard if there was anybody home they'd answer and you could talk sometimes the word telephone means far sound you know and in the early days the sound was Far all right calling next door could be long distance the problem you see was transmission the farther you were from the other party the weaker your voice came through and vice versa the telephone converts your voice from sound waves into electrical waves and back into sound waves in those days that was quite a trick once the voice went out over the wires it lost all of its zip and as we said the farther it went the weaker it got without a way to boost the signal even calling across town meant some shouting it took however some brilliant work by Bell Laboratory scientists and Engineers to solve that basic far sound transmission problem and here's how they did it the vacuum tube invented by Dr Lee Deforest and improved by Bell Laboratories it literally re evolutionized Communications its job to amplify boost the voice signal relay station set up along the way used vacuum tubes to keep the voice signal loud and clear as it raced on toward its destination drawing the far sound nearer yet when wires are loaded with a lot of conversations that are boosted in strength and travel some distance something else happens let me show you you see instead of sounding like this 1 2 3 4 5 your voice comes out sounding like this 1 2 3 4 5 distort this gentleman Harold Black solved the Distortion dilemma what an inspiration in devising the circuitry black created what he called a negative feedback amplifier what it did was take a little bit of the distorted signal reversed it just like a mirror put it back into the circuit and run it through again canceling out the Distortion with negative feedback telephone transmission became literally pardon the pun clear as a bell in the meantime of course the Laboratories came up with a host of other remarkable developments one invention for example electrical recording [Music] another work that helped give sound to the movies along with a contribution to radio broadcasting also came developments in short wave and soon they had people talking ship to shore reception good reception good we're approximately 1,700 miles from Boston position 48° 15 minutes north air to ground hello ground hello ground we're over Elmyra at 5,000 ft we hear you we hear you ground even continent to continent hello New York New York this is London hello New York this is London I hear you now yes loud and clear it was Bell Laboratories who created ways of sending television signals over telephone wires and later through the air soon those cross arms and open wires stretch ing across the land began to vanish cables got better too and bigger ingeniously cables were developed you could bury with technology allowing many calls to be carried over each single wire within the cable simultaneously other cables were fashion to lie on the bottom of the sea to function 20 years and longer trouble-free plus a type of cable that didn't look much like a cable at all called coaxial cable coax for short besides carrying more telep phone calls than several cables combined coax was and still is perfect for carrying television you've probably seen these on a tower sitting on a hill somewhere along a road they're microwave antennas microwave got its start back in the 1930s at you guessed it Bell Laboratories where scientists were exploring the use of radio for telephone circuits World War II erupted temporarily halting full-scale work on microwave but it did offer many laboratory scientists and Engineers the chance to apply what they' learned about microwave to a host of military Communications needs including radar with a war over research accelerated and soon microwave techniques and Equipment had become part of day-to-day telephone and television transmission with microwave calls ride a radio beam from Tower to Tower instead of going through cables a single beam carries some 2,000 calls at a time the far sound has come a long way since the old days hasn't it but transmission progress is only part of the story from the beginning another vital element switching fa just as many challenges if Bell System research had not met these challenges there frankly would not be a Nationwide telephone system today you see as soon as you have a number of phones you must be able to connect the right two without switching wires would have to connect every phone directly to every other phone and even that wouldn't work very well in the beginning all switching was done by hand at a switchboard by Central old-timers remember her Central was just a ticket she could do everything you needed remember numbers pick them out on the board plug them in ring unplug after the call but unfortunately Central went the way of the than the buggy the demand for more and faster service simply overwhelmed her in fact where Central's method of switching still in existence every person in the United States would have to be a telephone operator to handle today's volume of calls the problem was solved with two of the world's great technological innovations automatic switching and the dial telephone with both One telephone could find another without an operator without even a switchboard if the proper number was was known by the time direct distance dialing went into service the cost of a coast to coast call had fallen from $22 to less than $2 Alexander grah Bell used to say get off the road explore as though he knew where the keys to progress lay you can't invent create or make things new unless you believe in progress and change [Music] there's such a thing as tradition in the Bell System it's the tradition of finding new and better ways as more than 177,000 Bell patents and just about every field of scientific Endeavor testify here's an example a transistor like so many inventions its mother was necessity its father Ingenuity the type that has made Bell Laboratories one of the most renowned research and development organizations in the world the basic need came from the growth of the telephone Network itself each day hundreds of millions of voices and images move through the network each one is Switched again and again and boosted in strength again and again if you can save a fraction of a second during switching that adds up the Hope was to invent something that could do the same things that vacuum tubes do switch and amplify but do them better and faster and occupy less space that was a tall order scientists at Bell Laboratories began by experimenting with various materials to learn learn more about how electrical current moves this is silicon more pure than even nature makes it pure silicon doesn't carry electrical current well but when you add certain kinds of impurities such as Boron or arsenic very interesting things happen and what happens is the phenomenon that led to the invention of the transistor by the Laboratories in 1947 the transistor amplifies or boosts in strength an electrical signal here's how what does it it accepts a weak incoming signal then recreates the same signal but increased in strength many many times there are several types of transistors this one has three parts an emitter a base and a collector the incoming signal passes first into the emitter side then into the Bas which is a sort of valve that controls the strength of the signal when it passes into the collector side two sources of power are involved in this process a small battery through whose circuit the incoming signal is fed and a large battery which pushes the signal on its way let's look a little deeper a transistor is made from a slice of pure silicon to allow electrical current to flow through the Silicon tiny amounts of arsenic atoms are added to the emitter side and to The Collector side the atoms give these sides extra electrons which are negative charges a few atoms of boron are added to the base Boron provides extra holes which are positive charges it is the interaction of these negative and positive charges that helps make the transistor work but the negative electrons can move only when an electrical current is introduced into the transistor watch the negative electrons in the emitter side are attracted into the Bas because the small battery makes the base more positive positive attracts negative from here the electrons flow into the collector side driven by the large battery let's see what happens when only the large battery is working the electrons are pulled away from the base by the voltage of the large battery leaving only positive charged holes thus no current flows but when the smaller battery is connected the negative electrons are injected from the emitter into the base and from here respond to the power of the large battery so the current which flows is controlled by the small battery and has the power of the large battery now let's connect a weak telephone signal to the emitter side variations in the telephone signal control the flow of electrons through the valve likee base into the collector side of the transistor now the signal current is pushed by the large battery so it is much stronger than before as much as a thousand times stronger in other words the signal is Amplified and the transistor is doing what a vacuum tube does but it's far smaller it works much faster doesn't heat up doesn't take much electricity incredible huh a transistor just sits there and well transist the one under this microscope is hooked up so you can hear it amplify there it is a transistor this one even smaller than a grain of sand a miracle of modern technology a signal is being sent into it the oscilloscope screen displays the signal now amplification on off the transistor has indeed had a profound influence on the world we live in they're everywhere in portable radios television sets high-i hearing aids the artificial larynx which enables those who have lost their vocal cords to speak 3 2 1 zero all engine liftoff we have a liftoff 32 minutes past the hour got a roll to clear the entire Space Program the entire computer industry both became Possible only through the transistor and what began as a search for better telephone service but all that was yesterday here's today look closely there in the center about the size of a pin head Engineers call it an integrated circuit it contains hundreds of these transistors and other components microm miniaturized invisible to the naked eye the impact upon communication of such solid state developments as the transistor and integrated circuits has been tremendous and it's just beginning look what's already here an all electronic telephone office Superior in every way to anything before it that operates in millions of a second that can diagnose and automatically correct its own malfunction one that performs 1,800 basic jobs in the time it takes a person to Blink his eye that offers customers a bundle of new telephone services like call waiting and call forwarding if you're on the phone while someone else tries to call you call waiting lets you know it so you can hold your first call while answering the second call forwarding is a new service that lets you leave the house and have all your incoming calls transferred to wherever you plan to be here's another this is a traffic service position system it's being installed in telephone offices across the country with it operators can handle far greater numbers of calls and help customers faster than ever before it takes a fantastic amount of knoow to to design build install and man Communications equipment such as this that's where Western Electric and the telephone companies come in Western Electric's job is to translate inventions into the real thing the central office equipment the cables the new models of telephones that people use it's a big job the final inspection station is a long way from the laboratory materials are purified down to the last atom Mother Nature herself is seldom so careful even when the material is Right someone must be able to work with it and do everything exactly the same every time dissolve away a layer only a few atoms thick make a cut within a half millionth of an inch weld connections finer than human hair Precision Precision Precision multiplied a million times whether the end product is a phone cable or an entire electronic central office a Western Electric plant is not the place to look for yesterday yesterday we used to call it tomorrow remember in yesterday's tomorrow communication satellites were to shrink the world and this one did just that tellar this is only a model the research and development of Telstar by the Bell System gave birth to the entire era of worldwide telephone television and data transmission via space every kind of progress has a beginning a starting point and then someone has to move ahead and take the step that might make tomorrow better take this circular wave guide a wave guide no wider than a man's wrist that can carry a quarter of a million voices at a time one day one tomorrow wave guides may join coaxial cables on high capacity routes another tomorrow being perfected by Bell Labs the laser a remarkable invention that produces a remarkable light in theory a single laser beam could carry all the telephone conversations and television pictures going on right now around the world think of it some tomorrow and how about these recent developments for telephone systems an emergency storage battery with a lifespan of more than 30 years tiny indicator lamps that will burn continuously for 10 years the world's first tubless color television camera which weighs less than 10 [Music] lb remember the story called through the Looking Glass sure you do as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland she looked where everyone else had looked and saw something no one had ever seen that's what happened with fiber optics well people have been making clock from glass thread for years and everyone knows that light goes through glass now suppose you took a bundle of glass fibers made into a flexible pipe like this one which can bend around corners and send a laser beam loaded with telephone calls through it from one city to another wouldn't that make some telephone cable scientists are trying to do just that if no one tries one will find out whether it's practical to use glass fibers to carry millions of telephone calls with the kinds of advances in transmission that we've been seeing you can bet that switching research is getting a lot of attention too integrated circuits tiny and wondrous as they are would be hard put to handle millions of calls traveling down a laser beam at the same time several exciting areas are being explored one involves magnetic bubbles everyone has known about magnetism for a long time not long ago scientists found out something new about the subject in some materials a tiny bubble-shaped magnetic field can be formed and controlled the field can be moved back and forth up and down used to open and close a circuit magnetic bubbles make a switch smaller than anyone dreamed of years ago oh what an exciting World satellites wave guides lasers magnetic bubbles fiber optics picture phones someday maybe even in color in 1878 only 2 years after he invented the telephone Alexander granell did predict that men in distant places would one day communicate but could he have ever imagined that one day they'd see each other by phone who knows with his incredible foresight maybe he did I for one I'm sure he did oh